TV News: Ratings, Thrones, Fox, Bad

RatingsShowtime’s dark comedy “Nurse Jackie” opened its fourth season with 653,000 viewers, up 7% from last season’s premiere. The network’s other dark comedy “The Big C” dropped 35% to 581,000 viewers for its third season premiere.

The second season of “The Borgias” launched with 604,000 viewers, down 43% from last year’s series debut. However the second season opener was available online early and logged 1.13 million views.

Lifetime’s new Jennifer Love Hewitt drama series “Client List” scored 2.8 million viewers for the series premiere, the network’s most watched series debut since the 2009 premiere of “Drop Dead Diva”.

ABC’s new Shondra Rhimes-produced drama ”Scandal” opened to decent numbers in a 10pm timeslot late last week – a rating of 2.1/6 and a total of 7.4 million viewers. [Source: Variety]

Game of ThronesThe second episode of the second season of “Game of Thrones” held up extraordinarily well, pulling in 3.8 million viewers at 9 PM.

The episode retained virtually all (over 97%) of the 3.86 million viewership for last week’s season premiere which itself was a series high. The episode’s 11pm encore scored an additional 1.1 million for the night.

Despite the gains and buzz, HBO has yet to order an official third season pick-up though an announcement is expected soon. [Source: The Live Feed]

FOX RenewalsFox has officially announced renewals of three of its comedies – a second season for “New Girl”, a third for “Raising Hope” and a fourth for “Glee”. [Source: The Examiner]

Breaking BadBryan Cranston has confirmed the fifth and final season of “Breaking Bad” will be split into two eight episode halves, the season premiere episode having begun production last week in New Mexico.

“We’re splitting it. We’re going to shoot the first eight, then take a four-month production break, then the rest will air next year… We pick up right where we left off. We’re cleaning up the pieces from last season’s huge ordeal”. [Source: EW]